Melchizedek is one of the most mysterious characters of the book of Genesis. As priest of God Almighty he blessed Abraham, the patriarch returning from war, and received tithes from him. The Epistle to the Hebrews presents Jesus Christ as high priest according to Melchizedek’s priestly order, based on God’s oath found in Psalm 110:4. While Christ’s priestly order according to Melchizedek is higher than Aaron’s priestly order, it is important to remember that Christ is greater than (...) Melchizedek. In other words, Melchizedek derives his pattern from the preexistent Christ, and not the other way around. It is the purpose of this paper to bring to attention that the superiority of the characteristics of and blessings derived from Christ’s priesthood according to Melchizedek’s order is best understood only within this frame. (shrink)

According to Scripture, pastors have an important role in accomplishing the task Jesus Christ entrusted to His body, the Church: making disciples. The degree of pastors’ effectiveness can influence the accomplishment of this task. Stress is an important factor in pastors’ life and ministry, and it can thwart the realization of the mandate received by Jesus Christ. This study, after presenting a number of concepts related to stress and the definition of it, focuses on internal contributors to stress, (...) then continues with an overview of symptoms and stages of stress. Helpful methods of dealing with, reducing, preventing, and integrating stress are studied, then some theological implications conclude the paper. The study is combined with data drawn from the life and ministry of Hungarian Baptist pastors. (shrink)

I show that Kant’s depiction of the christic figure in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is not contingent but explains how this figure functions in two essential ways: as a representation of a maximum of morality that can ground our moral disposition and in so doing acts as a stan­dard for morality. More precisely, the following argument is made: 1) the sublime nature of the image of Christ — as an image of universal respect for the law (...) — awakens the moral feeling of subjects in the sense of the possibility of overcoming one’s perverted nature; 2) as moral perfection it provides immediate transparency to the end goal of morality; 3) just as in the case of associative construction of empirical concepts, the sublime provides the prototype for association through which empirical acts are determined as moral ones; 4) the image of Christ also acts as motivator by encompassing said trans­parency and standard in the idea of moral perfection. These four points show that the image of Christ functions in a dual manner. Points 1) to 3) address Christ as a prototype/archetype (Urbild) — awakening and making possible a moral redefinition of the subject — while point 4) addresses Christ as an example (Vorbild) — sustaining and entertaining the moral redefinition as a motivating model. (shrink)

Dialogue has its origins in joint activities, which it serves to coordinate. Joint activities, in turn, usually emerge in hierarchically nested projects and subprojects. We propose that participants use dialogue to coordinate two kinds of transitions in these joint projects: vertical transitions, or entering and exiting joint projects; and horizontal transitions, or continuing within joint projects. The participants help signal these transitions with project markers, words such as uh-huh, m-hm, yeah, okay, or all right. These words have been studied mainly (...) as signals of listener feedback (back-channel signals) or turn-taking devices (acknowledgment tokens). We present evidence from several types of well-defined tasks that they are also part of a system of contrasts specialized for navigating joint projects. Uh-huh, m-hm and yeah are used for horizontal transitions, and okay and all right for vertical transitions. (shrink)

On September 24, 787, the works of the VII Ecumenical Synod were opened in the 'Saint Sophia' Church in Nicaea, after the first attempt, on August 7, 786, had failed. Although the nominal presidency was held by the legates of Pope Adrian I, the effective presidency was exercised by Patriarch Tarasios of Constantinople. A skilful church diplomat, with experience, gained as an imperial secretary and a remarkable theologian whose authority was imposed even during his election as a patriarch amongst (...) the laity, Tarasios meticulously and clairvoyantly prepared for the deployment of the Nicene synod. This is noticeable from the agreement made with the papal legates regarding the reading of the letters of Pope Adrian I whose content directly concerned the persona of the patriarch, agreeing to omit those compromising paragraphs, from the procedure of re-welcoming in the communion of the church of some former iconoclastic bishops, by correctly managing the resistance of the monks to whom he gave satisfaction regarding the patristic and traditional argumentation of the cult of the holy icons and by rejecting point-by-point the dogmatic decision of the iconoclastic synod of Hieria, a rejection of which the patriarch Tarasie is in all probability the author. Satisfied with the success of the synod, whose craftsman he indeed was, Patriarch Tarasios was able to communicate to both Pope Adrian I and the emperors and clergy of Constantinople that the unity of the Church residing in Christ had been restored and that the place in the church and due honour of the holy icons had been restored through the synodal decision of 302 participants. The success of the Seventh Ecumenical Council is unequivocally because of the tactful and competent preparation and management of Patriarch Tarasios. CONTRIBUTION: The perspective we promote on the events highlighted in the study, could contribute to unblocking the theological dialogue between Orthodox and Catholics on the issue of papal primacy, the study thus promotes HTS as an important forum for mediating interfaith dialogue. (shrink)

There has been considerable discussion in the literature of one kind of identity problem that mathematical structuralism faces: the automorphism problem, in which the structure is unable to individuate the mathematical entities in its domain. Shapiro (Philos Math 16(3):285–309, 2008) has partly responded to these concerns. But I argue here that the theory faces an even more serious kind of identity problem, which the theory can’t overcome staying within its remit. I give two examples to make the point.

Beginning with Zagzebski (The Philosophical Quarterly 44:65–73, 1994), some philosophers have argued that there can be no solution to the Gettier counterexamples within the framework of a fallibilist theory of knowledge. If true, this would be devastating, since it is believed on good grounds that infallibilism leads to scepticism. But I argue here that these purported proofs are mistaken and that the truthmaker solution to the Gettier problems is both cogent and fallibilist in nature. To show this I develop the (...) notion of evidence of a state of affairs, a crucial concept in the truthmaker theory. I also argue that a common principle of the transmission of evidence through entailment is false, and the cause of much of the trouble. (shrink)

This paper advances a version of physicalism which reconciles the “a priori entailment thesis” (APET) with the analytic independence of our phenomenal and physical vocabularies. The APET is the claim that, if physicalism is true, the complete truths of physics imply every other truth a priori. If so, “cosmic hermeneutics” is possible: a demon having only complete knowledge of physics could deduce every truth about the world. Analytic independence is a popular physicalist explanation for the apparent “epistemic gaps” between phenomenal (...) and physical truths. The two are generally seen as incompatible, since the demon’s deductions seem to presuppose analytic connections between physical and phenomenal terms. I begin by arguing, in support of the APET, that implications from the complete truths of physics to phenomenal truths cannot be a posteriori. Such implications are (according to the physicalist) necessarily true. But they cannot be Kripke-style a posteriori necessities, since (according to the physicalist) the complete truths of physics fix any relevant a posteriori facts about the reference of terms. I then show how the physicalist can turn the tables: the demon can exploit the physical fixing of reference to bridge the gap between the vocabularies, by deducing when phenomenal and physical terms co-refer. This opens the way for a “type-C” physicalism, which accepts in-principle deducibility while still appealing to analytic independence to explain why we (who are not demons) find it impossible to see phenomenal-physical connections a priori. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adrian Del Caro PAUL CELAN'S UNCANNY SPEECH On October 22, 1960, Paul Celan was in Darmstadt, West Germany, to accept the prestigious Georg-Bûchner-Preis. Winners of this prize are required by custom to give a speech on some aspect of Georg Büchner's writings, and Celan followed suit with a speech entitled "Der Meridian." The speech itself, as an address given in German in Germany to German listeners, was uncanny, (...) but it was Celan's "uncanny" discourse that had earned him this prize in the first place. In his poetry die uncanny takes on a life of its own. In the Meridian speech, dimensions of the uncanny in Büchner's writings are explored for the purpose of shedding light on the artistic impulse, and on poetry in particular. The poetic of Paul Celan is difficult to define from the aggregate of his poems, and hardly transparent in the Meridian speech, either. But it is the concentration on the uncanny in "Meridian" that makes the effort worthwhile. I will use the Meridian speech, examples from German literature, and examples of Celan's poems to unpack this uncanny. "Meridian," like so many words chosen by Celan, is full. Among the things it can mean are highest point, prime of life, circle from pole to pole, and lines numbered according to degrees of longitude. We speak also of a prime meridian, namely Greenwich, having the property of a center, of a locus from which we determine our bearings. Celan the linguist and etymologist knew and considered all meanings. "Uncanny" as a translation of German das Unheimliche is not quite sufficient, but it is a good starting point. German heim is English home, and unheimlich, unheimisch would be unhomely or unhomey—at least in the etymological spirit. When things are not as they are at home, they are unheimlich. Grimm's dictionary tells us that it wasn't until die end of Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 211-224 212Philosophy and Literature the eighteenth century that an emotive quality was added to this formerly cognitive adjective; it began at diis time to be associated with feelings of terror, dread, and anxiety. The Romantic Ludwig Tieck was among the first German writers to treat supernatural, uncanny themes, and as unheimlich became associated with the supernatural, it began to lose its sense of homeliness. Later on, E. T. A. Hoffmann became a master of die uncanny in his numerous weird tales. English "uncanny," which is still the best translation we have for unheimlich, experienced a similar development away from its origins in Scottish, where canny meant quiet, snug, cozy, and pleasant. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that "supernatural, mysterious, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar" were properties ascribed to "uncanny" after 1850. Poe's writings are uncanny in this modern sense. Freud devoted an essay to the uncanny in 1919. He made die point diat das Unheimliche is merely das Heimliche that we have repressed. Ifwe romanticize this idea, dien in the beginning all things were heimlich or homey to us, and it is only after consciousness thatwe become alienated from our home in nature, a condition which makes us feel unheimlich. Celan certainly had strong reason to focus on the earliest meaning of unheimlich, since he experienced homelessness in virtually every conceivable sense of the word, but then, so did his people, dieJews; first in their experience of the Diaspora, then in their "final" eradication during the Holocaust. The people without Boden or land became, by 1945, a people no longer of die earth. Freud linked the concept of das Unheimliche to its origin in heimlich. After exhaustively quoting the lexicologists Sanders and Grimm, Freud concluded that only Schelling had added a new dimension to das Unheimliche: "Uncanny would be everything that is supposed to remain a secret, remain concealed, but has emerged."1 This is credible enough, and fits Freud's repression theory. Freud's statement at the conclusion of the first part of his long essay would have appealed to Celan: "Heimlich is a word according to whose meaning an ambivalence develops until finally it corresponds in any uncanny way with its opposite. Unheimlich is somehow a kind ofheimlich... (shrink)

ABSTRACTIntellectual historians often make empirical claims, but can never know for certain if these claims are right. Uncertainty is thus inevitable for intellectual historians. But accepting uncertainty is not enough: we should also act on it, by trying to reduce and report it. We can reduce uncertainty by amassing valid data from different sources to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of competing explanations, rather than trying to “prove” an empirical claim by looking for evidence that fits it. Then we should (...) report our degree of certainty in our claims. When we answer empirical questions in intellectual history, we are not telling our readers what happened: we are telling them how strong we think our evidence is—a crucial shift of emphasis. For intellectual historians, then, uncertainty is subjective, as discussed by Keynes and Collingwood; the paper thus explores three differences between subjective and objective uncertainty. Having outlined the theoretical basis of uncertainty, the paper then offers examples from actual research: Noel Malcolm's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about composition, and David Wootton's work shows how to reduce and report uncertainty about beliefs. (shrink)

Kant identifies what are in fact Free Riders as the most noxious species of polemicists. Kant thinks polemic reduces the stature and authority of reason to a method of squabbling that destabilizes social equilibrium and portends disintegration into the Hobessian state of nature. In the first Critique, Kant proposes two textually related solutions to the Free Rider problem.

Alain Badiou credits Jacques Lacan with the formulation of an idea of love that demands to be granted a central place in the structure of any contemporary philosophy worthy of the name. However, at the same time, Badiou is understandably wary of the psychoanalytic tendency to dismiss the amorous as epiphenomenal in relation to the libidinal, to treat love as disguised lust. In both avoiding the indefensible move of strictly partitioning the amorous and the libidinal by situating them as two (...) poles of a mutually-exclusive opposition as well as refusing to reduce one to the other, it must be asked: How does desiring something occasionally become loving nothing? The true challenge for a joint philosophical-psychoanalytic delineation of the amorous is to develop the basis for an explanation of how love miraculously emerges from lust, that is, of how the interplay between various libidinal factors creates the amorous seemingly ex nihilo via ontogenetic processes in the midst of which transpires what appears as a dynamic of transubstantiation elevating lust to love.". (shrink)

This article reconsiders history's ways of reporting in prose. Ways of analysing and writing history so as to evoke a past are contrasted with ways of analysing and writing history so as to frame theses about a past. Academic norms now favour theses. It was not always so. This article contrasts very early European theories about writing prose, including key writings by Johannine Christians and by Heraclitus. Influenced by Martin Heidegger's existentialist phenomenology, this article reasserts the worth of the evocative (...) in history by attempting to reprise its philosophical foundations and by reconstructing the place of prose in the history of ideas. (shrink)

In this essay, I respond to Žižek's charges that my turns to biology risk naturalizing away key features of non-natural subjectivity à la German idealism and Lacanianism. The crux of this dispute between him and me concerns how close to or far from a life-science-based naturalism a materialist theory of the subject with allegiances to Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan should be. I contend that materialism must be closer to naturalism than Žižek allows— while insisting simultaneously that the spontaneous naturalism (...) of the cutting edge of the life sciences isn’t the semi-reductive paradigm Žižek believes it to be. (shrink)

BackgroundAustralian health and medical research funders support substantial research efforts, and incentives within grant funding schemes influence researcher behaviour. We aimed to determine to what extent Australian health and medical funders incentivise responsible research practices.MethodsWe conducted an audit of instructions from research grant and fellowship schemes. Eight national research grants and fellowships were purposively sampled to select schemes that awarded the largest amount of funds. The funding scheme instructions were assessed against 9 criteria to determine to what extent they incentivised (...) these responsible research and reporting practices: publicly register study protocols before starting data collection, register analysis protocols before starting data analysis, make study data openly available, make analysis code openly available, make research materials openly available, discourage use of publication metrics, conduct quality research, collaborate with a statistician, and adhere to other responsible research practices. Each criterion was answered using one of the following responses: “Instructed”, “Encouraged”, or “No mention”.ResultsAcross the 8 schemes from 5 funders, applicants were instructed or encouraged to address a median of 4 of the 9 criteria. Three criteria received no mention in any scheme. Importantly, most incentives did not seem strong as applicants were only instructed to register study protocols, discourage use of publication metrics and conduct quality research. Other criteria were encouraged but were not required.ConclusionsFunders could strengthen the incentives for responsible research practices by requiring grant and fellowship applicants to implement these practices in their proposals. Administering institutions could be required to implement these practices to be eligible for funding. Strongly rewarding researchers for implementing robust research practices could lead to sustained improvements in the quality of health and medical research. (shrink)

Volumul de articole, studii, cuvântări şi Pastorale publicat la Editura Mitropolia Olteniei din Craiova în anul 1986 trebuie văzut şi analizat, pentru o bună şi corectă înţelegere, în lumina vremurilor în care a apărut. În acelaşi timp, ideile pe care IPS Nestor Vornicescu, Arhiepiscopul Craiovei şi Mitropolitul Olteniei, le dezvoltă în scrierile sale sunt actuale şi după aproape 30 de ani de la strângerea lor între paginile aceleaşi cărţi, după ce văzuseră lumina tiparului cu ani în urmă în diferite reviste (...) din ţară şi străinătate, semn că autorul dovedeşte o putere impresionantă de a rămâne viu prin scrierile sale într-o epocă în care totul era dictat şi atent controlat şi cenzurat de la centru. În zilele noastre, într-o perioadă în care cei ce abordează teme ca „patriotism”, „românism”, „idealul strămoşilor”, „istoria naţională”, „pacea pe pământ”, „munca”, „dreptatea” ş.a. sunt consideraţi a fi spirite retrograde şi contaminate de perioada apusă şi de tristă amintire, cuvintele IPS Nestor Vornicescu referitoare la aceste idei rămân de o actualitate ce îi lasă pe mulţi fără replică. În ciuda faptului că anumite cuvinte şi expresii au fost acaparate de doctrina comunistă, schimbându-li-se sensul, ele reprezintă constante şi permanenţe atât ale spiritului nostru naţional, cât şi virtuţi creştine despre care s-a vorbit şi trebuie să se vorbească şi să fie respectate pentru a putea să ne orientăm într-o Europă din care ele nu au dispărut nicio clipă din discursul oficial sau particular şi în care România îşi caută coordonatele naţionale pentru a se adapta după integrarea atât de mult dorită de toţi. „Volumul Pace pe pământ îl adevereşte pe Mitropolitul şi Academicianul Nestor Vornicescu ca ierarh şi teolog pe linia învăţăturii şi a tradiţiei Ortodoxiei româneşti, iubitor şi luptător pentru ţară şi popor, pentru pace şi înţelegere între oameni şi neamuri, pentru apărarea păcii şi a vieţii. Concluzia categorică este că pacea – salvgardarea, apărarea, întărirea, impunerea şi permanentizarea ei urbi et orbi – constituie imperativul vital al zilelor noastre, cum arată autorul pe bună dreptate”.2. (shrink)

The interreligious dialogue is not a new theme in the history of Christianity, the possibility of its realization being analyzed from the early centuries. Nowadays, the way that other religions are viewed has changed essentially, the religious, political, economic and social realities, being completely different than in the beginning. However, a correct handling of interreligious dialogue cannot disregard the past, more than that, the ideas from the works of the Holy Fathers, church writers, theologians and old thinkers remain valid and (...) are used as themes in the current discussions of the interreligious dialog. Among them, an important place takes Cantemir, the Prince of Moldavia, who lived for a long time in Constantinople. His works, which deals with the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic doctrine, have their basis in the personal experience and in the depth knowledge of the main Islamic sources that helped him to give to posterity the representative works for the knowledge of the Muslim religion and relations between Christianity and Islam during the development and decay of the Ottoman Empire. The way he presents the relation between Christianity and Islam, approaches him to the other Christian writers of his time which are addressing the same topic, highlighting the sadness of an era in which the great Christian empire fell under Ottoman rule and also the hopes of the Orthodox worldwide Christians to release the Christianity, having central the idea of approaching the apocalyptic time when Christianity will triumph. (shrink)

Catholic theologians after Trent saw the Protestant teaching about the remnants of original sin in the justified as one of the ‘chief ’ errors of Protestant soteriology. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, and many Protestant theologians believed that a view of concupiscence as sinful, strictly speaking, did away with any reliance on good works. This conviction also clarified the Christian’s dependence on the imputed righteousness of Christ. Catholic theologians condemned this position as detracting from the work of (...) class='Hi'>Christ who takes away the sins of the world. The rejection of this teaching—and the affirmation of Trent’s statement that original sin is taken away and that the justified at baptism is without stain or ‘immaculate’ before God—is essential for understanding Catholic opposition to Protestant soteriology. Two Spanish Dominican Thomists, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, rejected the Protestant teaching on imputation in part because of its connection with the view on the remnants of original sin in the justified. Adrian and Peter van Walenburch, brothers who served as auxiliary bishops of Cologne in the second half of the seventeenth century, argued that the Protestants of their time now agreed with the Catholic Church on a number of soteriological points. They also drew upon some of their post–Tridentine predecessors to offer a Catholic account of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Nonetheless, the issue of sin in the justified remained a point of serious controversy. (shrink)

The right to bodily integrity is a controversial issue within moral, political and legal discourse. This first collection of scholarly research articles provides a comprehensive overview of the debates around the ethical and legal aspects of the right to bodily integrity and its implications in theory and practice. The selected essays examine topics such as pregnancy and reproduction, altering children's bodies, transplantation, controversial modifications and surgeries, and experimentation and dead bodies.

This article proposes an ecophilosophy of the cinema. It builds on Martin Heidegger’s articulation of art as ‘world-disclosing,’ and on a Whiteheadian and Deleuzian understanding of the universe as a lively and eventful place in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming. Accordingly, it proposes that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds. These worlds are, at once, anthropomorphic, geomorphic, and biomorphic, with each of these registers mapping (...) onto the ‘three ecologies,’ in Felix Guattari’s terms, that make up the relational ontology of the world: the social, the material, and the mental or perceptual. Through an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), I suggest that cinema ‘stalks’ the world, and that our appreciation of its potentials should similarly involve a kind of ‘stalking’ of its effects in the material, social, and perceptual dimensions of the world from which cinema emerges and to which it returns. (shrink)

Individualism is seen as a central component of moder- nity. (Individualism is, in Charles Taylor’s view for ex- ample, the most beautiful achievement of modernity.) From an apologetic perspective, individualism corresponds to an objective, real need of self-achievement; it repre- sents an essential step towards emancipation. This paper does not aim at contending with this description of the concept of individualism, because to do so would mean suggesting an alternative ideology, but instead it aims at understanding the real grounds of (...) the development of individualism in order to correct the “propagandistic” image of modern individualism. The main arguments which are used to correct this image are that individualism is the expression of a certain crisis of the spirit, not of a prosperity of the spirit, and the resources of its vindication are in fact “intellectual fabrications,” myths rather than objective discoveries. (shrink)